Environmental Education through STEAM Erasmus Project

Project Title

Environmental Education through STEAM

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for Schools Only

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2017

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Environment and climate change; Pedagogy and didactics

Project Summary

Our project addressed students, as well as teachers and parents, in a world which can be described as changing rapidly, with consequences on the quality of the life of the people. On one hand, there was the need of making school activities more attractive for our students, who reported more and more often that what they learnt in school was useless and had no applicability in the real life. This required new teaching and learning approaches and STEAM (the acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Maths) is one of them, since it catered for innovation, collaboration and real-world problem solving. Moreover, including STEAM into the curriculum from early stages would encourage the students to embrace STEAM future STEAM careers, thus filling the gap which existed on the job market. It was true that not all the students would follow such a career, but there were other benefits of STEAM. On the other hand, environmental education is one of the main challenges of the 21st century and there is a need to swift from declarative acts towards real actions which provided us with a healthier world for ourselves and for the generations to come. In this context, our project embedded STEAM into environmental teaching and learning with the purpose of offering our students model of how to solve real-world issues using their age-appropriate knowledge. One advantage of this approach was that it built on solid Science and Maths knowledge, which would lead to the improvement of their school results in these disciplines.
The objectives of our project were:
-to integrate and apply knowledge and skills to solve authentic environmental problems through STEAM;
-to develop learning and teaching resources related to STEAM disciplines in the field of environmental education;
-to enhance the skills and the collaboration among teachers in schools and the partnerships with community in the field of environmental education through STEAM.
The project involved five schools from Denmark, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania and Romania with manifested interest in STEAM disciplines and environmental education. The teachers who participated in the project were affiliated to the partner schools and the subjects they taught covered all the curricula of the schools involved. This fact was a plus for our project because we had foreseen STEAM teachers participating in the project but it stirred the interest of teachers of other subjects, such as Languages, Geography, History, Physical Education, Social Studies. The students participating in the project were organized into Erasmus+ Clubs. The number of the students who had asked to join the club overcame the initial numbers, due to the fact that they were attracted by the activities organised with different entities we cooperated with. The direct participants were aged 11 to 16, but there were also indirect participants from our schools, aged 6 to 16.
The activities were designed to answer the requirements of the STEAM approach applied to environmental education: study of the theoretical knowledge so that the teachers had the foundation for applying STEAM and practical activities for our students. The participants in the project benefited from attractive teaching methods, which made the connection between what was taught in school and real-world problems. The activities included: indoor and outdoor lessons, exhibitions, demonstrations, study visit,competitions, experiments.
The results of the project comprised the following types of results:
-tangible: website, logo, presentations, dictionary, booklets, posters, games, calendars;
-intangible: more knowledge of STEAM teaching and sustainability of the environment, foreign languages, ICT.
The impact of our project can summarized as it follows: change in the attitude and the behavior of the participants towards sustainable actions concerning the environment; more attractive lessons related to the topic of the project; enhanced cooperation between the staff; enhanced desire to participate in partnerships; change of perspective concerning the choice of a project topic (enhanced cooperation between the teachers participating in a project, thus the future actions are better taught and structured, involving a larger number of students).This type of cooperation led to new project ideas using topics which were approached more deeply.
The longer term benefits consisted of the implementation of a new elective subject, “Hazards and human behaviour”, a new county competition for students studying English, which uses STEAM knowledge and involves the cooperation of all the teachers in the school, the study of the 2030 AGENDA and the launching of a Symposium for the students (with international participation).

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 109465 Eur

Project Coordinator

Scoala Gimnaziala “Otilia Cazimir” Iasi & Country: RO

Project Partners

• Lakiteleki Eötvös Lóránd Általános Iskola és Alapfokú Müvészeti Iskola
• Anna Trolles Skole
• Vilniaus r. Nemencines Gedimino gimnazija
• I.C. AOSTA